That Fic Where It's A Deathfic Only Not Really
by PutMoneyInThyPurse
Summary: ...which is what happens when you try to think up a title at 4:38AM. Kelly has a really, really, really realistic nightmare. Scotty's there when he wakes up. The End.
1. Chapter 1

The pink-striped Jeep is parked behind him, Acapulco sun beating down upon him. He sits alone on the low wall, feet dangling, listening to the shouts of the children playing way down below, the way they did two years ago. It's hard to remember anything of the events of two years ago. He wasn't in his right mind then.

He isn't now, either.

"All alike." Did he really say that? He supposes so. He hopes Scotty never thought he meant it. In any sense. He hopes Scotty knew so many things… but most of all, he wishes things could have been different.

If only he'd jumped, that day. If only Scotty hadn't stopped him. Scotty would have been broken up about it, but he'd have survived. Probably quit the service. By now he'd be over it, married with kids somewhere. Living the life he ought to have had. Instead, Kelly's useless heart beats on for nothing, while the finest man he has ever known lies in the earth.

At least Mom and Jo will be well provided for. Whatever else its flaws, the Department takes good care of the families of those who give their lives for their country. And Kelly's glad that Scotty's brother Russell came home. He met him briefly, when he took Scotty back to be buried in Philly. He tries to remember what it was like to be there, Mom holding Kelly and crying, but all he can remember is feeling like a traitor, a usurper, being there with them while one worthier should have been. As soon as Russell arrived and he was sure the women had a man with them, he fled. Funeral, hell. He doesn't even remember packing. No suitcase on the flight, hands dangling uselessly at his sides.

He told himself he didn't know why he was headed for Acapulco, but he was lying. He knew. He's always known, ever since that moment he saw Scotty fall, ever since he gathered his partner's body into his arms and felt the life sigh out of him.

He looks down the cliffside, at the children playing down below. He's sorry to upset them. He never meant this. Never meant a lot of things. And he should be strong enough to live and set right all those wrongs, but setting the world to rights is beyond the powers of a lone, lamebrain secret agent. And he's tired. Man, he is so very, very tired.

He has no delusions that he'll see Scotty again. Whether there's an afterlife or there isn't, he knows that anywhere Scotty would end up isn't any place _he_ could ever hope to enter. It's not that. He's just had enough. Enough of fighting, enough of resisting… _enough._

When he slips forward off the wall, it's silent and quick, like dropping into a swimming pool, down into the water with nary a ripple.


	2. Chapter 2

"Kel—"

Strong arms catch him, and he fights, flails. He's made his decision.

"Simmer down there, Ace!" Scotty wonders what the heck his partner's been dreaming about, to make him fight so hard. "Cool it! You wanna smack me in the mouth and claim it's an accident, huh, that it?"

He watches as Kelly flails a bit more, squeezes his eyes shut, opens them, and blinks a couple of times, then grabs Scotty by the upper arms, hard enough to bruise. "…" He opens his mouth, and Scotty could swear there were words trying to come out, but then he closes his mouth, and his eyes, and when he opens them again, his face is shuttered. His hands fall away from Scotty, and he slumps to the floor again, lying flat on his back, gazing at the ceiling with vacant, burnt-out eyes.

"Hey…" The look in Kelly's eyes is scaring Scotty, not to mention the way he's trembling. "Would you," he chooses his words carefully, "mind telling me what that was all about?"

Kelly looks at Scotty's face, _panicked, _Scotty could swear for a moment, then he's back to pseudo-impassive with a side of primal terror. Like he just came back from the dead… or Scotty did.

Scotty sighs inwardly. It's no great mystery to him what Kelly was dreaming about, even if he doesn't tell him, and by his continued silence he doesn't think Kelly's going to; they stare down death so many times that an instant replay in the night is virtually guaranteed at one time or another. This must have been a real doozy, though. Scotty knows what it's like to have a nightmare that's so real you think it's reality that's the dream, when you wake up. "Technicolor, huh?" he ventures, not at all sure he won't get his head bit off.

The way Kelly's eyes drink in his face, hungrily, tell Scotty the dream was probably about his, Scotty's, own death. Oh, boy. The ones where your partner dies are worse than the ones where you die yourself.

The silence stretches on, and Kelly drags a hand over his face. Scotty just waits, patiently, like he's got nothing else to do and no place else to be, which he hasn't, on both counts, not that it would matter if he had, and is eventually rewarded with a shaky sigh. "Chronological."

"Mm-hmm." Lots of events, all connected; more realistic. Drat. Those are the worst, Scotty knows. He starts stroking Kelly's forearm, lightly, up and down, looking over at the drapes drawn across the window. Out of the corner of his eye he can see the set of the white jaw, the twitches of muscle that herald the play of emotions across Kelly's expressive face. "Anything I should know about?"

"Nope—" Kel's reply is bitten off, and he swings up, turning towards the bed, and recoiling from it in the same movement. He walks over to the white, ultramodern plastic bar over in the corner, and stands there, his back to Scotty, looking like he's picking out something to wet his whistle. At—Scotty glances at the clock—at 4:48 AM. _Right._

"Planning an all-nighter?"

"How 'bout you just shut up," Kelly snaps, then whirls, and there's such shock and desolation and—_grief?_—in his contrite face that Scotty stands, cutting across his shamefaced, "I'm sorry, I didn't…" with a shout of his own.

"Kelly, just simmer down and tell me what's got you rattled like a canary at a cat convention! It's lovin' 4:50 in the morning, c'mon!"

"Nothin'," Kelly mutters, bending to the bar, the sound of clinking glass underlying his words. "The usual. You died."

The very fact that Kelly's blurting it out so easily means there's more. "And then what?"

A deep sigh, a headshake, Kelly's hand reaching up to rub his eyes. "Nothin' much. I, uh…" Another sigh. "I…took your, uhm. Your body home."

_Aw, Kelly._ Scotty chills in sympathy. The mere thought of having to transport Kelly's dead body anyplace makes him physically sick, and it'll have been worse for his self-denigrating partner, because Scotty knows what Kelly isn't saying: the crushing guilt he'd feel taking Mom her son's body, like he should have died in Scotty's place. "Hey, it's just a…"

He stops short. He almost missed it, but there it is: that particular slouch of Kel's shoulders, the infinitesimal lessening of the tension around his eyes, that only Scotty can see – he's seen Department bosses and foreign enemies miss it enough times – and which says, _Thank God, dodged the bullet._ "What else?"

"What—what else, whaddaya mean, what else." Kelly's voice is a low, indistinct mutter. He raises his glass, takes a sip, makes a show of swallowing. "Isn't that bad enough."

"It is. But there's more."

Kelly's elbows rest on the bar, his head down between his shoulders. "And we all lived unhappily ever after."

Scotty knows he shouldn't push, maybe, but he's passed some kinda point of no return, here. "Lay it on me."

"Lay you in the ground, more like—" The misery in Kelly's voice tears at Scotty's heart, and he watches as his partner drains his glass, reaches for a refill.

Scotty's getting mad again, and he strides over to the bar, snatching the bottle out of Kelly's hand. "Just tell me! It was only a dream, for cripes' sake, why you gotta be so—"

"I went to Acapulco," Kelly snarls, and snatches the bottle away, and while Scotty blinks, he uncaps it and takes a quick swig without bothering with the glass. _Kill himself drinking someday, _the familiar thought slips across Scotty's brain, and then he stops absolutely cold because he kinda thinks he knows what, exactly, dream-Kelly did in Acapulco.

"Where in Acapulco," Scotty asks, more to keep a lid on his anger than out of any real doubt.

Kelly gives him a Look that says, _You know, so shut up._

"And what did you hope to accomplish?" he snarls.

"You said it yourself," Kelly says mildly. "It was just a dream."

"What exactly," Scotty grates, needing to be sure before he throttles his tomfool partner, "occurred in your just-a-dream?"

"The usual." Kelly's trying for flippant. "Death and destruction."

"My death?" He barrels on without waiting for an answer. "And whose destruction?"

Kelly's still again, except for his harsh breath and his trembling hand. He mutters something.

"What was that?"

Kelly turns to face him, lines etched deep into his face, a hundred years old, older. He's clearly trying for lightness, though it falls flat. "I was _tired, _okay?"

But Scotty can't see the pretend petulance in his expression, can't hear the pretend whine in the voice. All he can see is a man who's been knocked down too many times, and gotten right up again, day after day after _day, _waking up every morning to go right on lying and hiding and cheating and stealing, and double-dealing and God knows what else, grinding his soul down a little more each time, killing the people he loves with lies.

And Scotty flinches, then, because he's done the same, too, killed the people he cared for, by playing with their feelings and betraying them, only he went into it a little less innocent than his white knight on his trusty charger, and so maybe he hurts just a little bit less. But it's all there, in Kelly's face – what would become of him if he didn't have Scotty to lean on. What, for that matter, would remain of Scotty if Kelly died, (jeez, the very thought cuts him to the bone) even if he didn't go through the physical motions like dream-Kelly clearly did.

He doesn't ask him "Did you jump?" or anything so dumb. He just holds the desperate, lost gaze, vulnerable eyes set in an impassive, stone mask, until Kelly looks away.

"What," he finally asks, "do I gotta do to make you not… to make sure you never do that?"

"Stay alive," says Kelly shortly, and pours a drink into a glass this time.

"You know neither of us ever dies," Scotty offers, but it sounds lame even to his ears. He knows how real emotions can be, even when their source is false, and he doesn't mean to make light of Kelly's suffering. "Sorry."

"Don't make promises you can't keep, Dobbsie."

"I won't," Scotty says slowly. His mind is puzzling through this dilemma slowly, trying to unravel the threads. "So, do you promise not to do that, even if I can't promise to stay immortal?"

"Not immortal." Kelly takes his drink, croses over to the sofa and sits, heavily, a dark shape in the shadows. "Just live long enough to get outa this job and start a family."

"And what will you do, pray tell?"

"About what?"

Scotty sighs. "Talking to you, see, it's like banging your head against a brick wall – it feels so good when you stop!" He rubs a hand over his eyes, but doesn't move – he doesn't trust himself near Kel just yet. "What," he enunciates carefully, "are you going to_ do _ should I follow your sound advice, get out and start a family?"

Kelly waves a hand. "Who cares, 'leastways…" he trails off.

"Leastways what?"

His partner's voice is slightly slurred. Scotty wouldn't have thought he could get tipsy so quickly, but then, it's late. "Don't worry about it."

"Leastways," Scotty's at the end of his tether, _"what?"_

The dark shape that's Kelly slumps wearily into the cushions. "Leastways I'll die without having to live through that." And as though the admission has opened the floodgates, he goes on, in a low, fading mutter, "Better to die by a Russkie bullet… than have to bury your partner and jump off a cliff, any day."

By the end of the sentence, Kelly's horizontal on the couch, snoring softly. He's so emotionally exhausted he's practically passed out.

_He's that tired,_ Scotty thinks, eyes drawn to the dark shape in the soft-velvet night. _So tuckered out after all these years that the only way out he can see anymore is—_

Scotty swallows hard. He wants to be angry, he really does. Anger would be better than this sick emptiness in his gut, staring at Kelly sleeping and imagining him again stepping off that cliff. Scotty shudders, and tries again to reach for his anger. In the daytime he'd be boiling mad. But it's the middle of the night, and he can't very well wake Kelly up to yell at him, so he's stuck here alone, with his thoughts rattling around the inside of his skull.

He sits on the coffee table, watching his partner's face, lined and unhappy even in sleep. When did this happen? Oh, he knew they were getting burnt out, shell-shocked even, but for Kelly to be that broken, to only ever see his relief in death, that was a special kind of screwy. This, he didn't – Heck, he knew it, knew ol' Kel had a death wish, but he didn't think it was this bad. Didn't think that without him, Kelly'd fall apart.

Well, he does now. Hesitantly, he reaches out, smoothes out the lines in Kelly's brow with his knuckles. Kelly shifts and seems to relax slightly. Scooting closer, Scotty awkwardly smoothes his fingers along the grooves worn into the tired face. His heart lurches, and he's struck with such a helpless urge to guard and protect, the for a moment it's a physical pain, straining there in his chest. Kelly. Oh, man.

Needing something to do, he jumps up, gathers the covers off Kelly's bed, and drapes them carefully over the sleeping man on the couch. As he pulls them up over Kelly's shoulders and tucks them in, Kelly gives a little sigh of gratitude and smiles in his sleep, and suddenly Scotty's over the moon, riding high on a wave of contentment.

And just like that, he understands. Logic has its uses. What's his priority? To keep Kelly safe. He needs no proof that Kel's is the same. What's keeping them from it? The job. What's the logical conclusion?

Nodding, he crosses over to the coffee table again, sits beside Kelly and places a hand on the blanket-draped arm, filling with warmth and contentment as the half-smile reappears. "You go ahead and catch them Z's, Hoby," he whispers, "and tomorrow we get to talk about opening that restaurant. Russell Gabriel don't like it, he can be the maitre d'. Or do the dishes."

He stays like that for a while, then, secure in the logic of his conclusion, climbs into bed and sleeps the sleep of the just.

* * *

Note: This started out as a one-shot. It stayed so for the longest time. But I hadn't counted on Sarah's First Law of Fanfic, namely: Thou Shalt Always Have a Happy Ending.


End file.
